The Education Transformation We Need

In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Its focus on the low standardized test scores of (some) American children compared to those of other nations combined with dire warnings that it would, if not urgently addressed, lead to our imminent economic demise, made it one of the few non-partisan issues in our ever more deeply divided nation.

This wasn't the first time that politicians blamed education for economic problems, of course. That goes back to the beginning of modern schooling when industrialized nations created mandatory assembly-line schools in the hopes manufacturing assembly-line workers to serve the Industrial Revolution. Since then, whenever policymakers have been confronted by their own failures, they've conveniently pointed their fingers at schools. What was new in this report, was the assertion that racial inequality and poverty could also be solved by schools.

So for the past 40 years or so, our entire political establishment has more or less agreed that our schools, which is to say teachers, parents, and children, are responsible for fixing racial and economic inequality as well as the economy as a whole. It's not an accident that every administration since Reagan has, in one way or another, called education reform "the civil rights issue of our time." This conveniently shifts the blame for their failure to address inequality onto our schools. When, predictably, inequality has gotten worse due to lack of political action, our policymakers predictably deflect the blame onto "incompetent teachers", "bad parents", and "lazy children".

Recession? Poverty? Racial inequality? Blame the schools, blame the teachers, blame the parents, blame the kids. And since it's impossible to educate our way out of these systemic problems, of course our schools fail, which leads to yet another round of top-down reform. 

It's a vicious and cruel cycle.

Do we need to reform education in our country? Absolutely. And the first step in that reform is to bust the myth that education is here to serve the economy. If the primary purpose of our schools is to train workers, which is what policymakers of all political stripes would have us believe, then perhaps we the people shouldn't be paying for it at all. If it's all about vocational training, then maybe it's time to let the corporations train their own damn workers.

So then why do we need schools? Well, frankly, we don't, but if we're going to be a self-governing, democratic society, one that values equality and justice for all, we need a population of critical thinkers. We need citizens who have the skills, habits, knowledge, and curiosity to think for themselves. We need citizens who listen to one another, who value fairness, who know it's not just their right, but also their responsibility to articulate their own nuanced thoughts and ideas, and who are capable of coming to agreements, of working with others, and who are self-motivated.

Can our schools do this? Not as they are currently conceived. We probably need transformation more than reformation. But when we think in terms of critical thinking instead of schooling or education, we find common ground across the political spectrum. 

I'm just one preschool teacher who spent his career in one school. I never once considered the economic prospects of the children in my care. All I ever concerned myself with was creating a community in which everyone was free to think for themselves. And because it was a community, these free thinkers would have to talk and listen to one another, to come to agreements, to figure out how to get their own needs met while, in fairness, also making it a place in which others could get their needs met. Because it was a community, if things were to get done, it wasn't on me or some other authority to do it, but rather the responsibility fell to these critical thinkers, working together.

This is the education transformation we need.

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"Few people are better qualified to support people working in the field of early childhood education than Teacher Tom. This is a book you will want to keep close to your soul." ~Daniel Hodgins, author of Boys: Changing the Classroom, Not the Child, and Get Over It! Relearning Guidance Practices

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